Building a better web

I've said this before, but, egad, why the hell are we discouraging people who are building tools - good or bad, useful or useless, on the right track or off base - because everything that is happening right now is necessary to build a better web. horsepigcow

I met Tara at the Scoble/MacLeod dinner. Her energy and enthusiasm are palpable and I'm happy to say I think she's absolutely right to make this point. For reasons that she may, or may not, support, I'm with the Web 2.0 guys because as Stowe Boyd says, 'there is a new sensibility about web applications -- how they are conceived, designed, built, marketed and sold -- that in aggregate is truly different (from) what preceded it'.

And then there's this from Grant McCracken, discussing three, no four models of Internet 2.0 (the first three being disintermediation, long tail, reformation). He's talking about 'doing research in Korea.  Teens and college students were creating new networks with webpages (the local equivalent of MySpace) and and the clouds of photos and messages they were sending one another.  I assumed that this was Model 2 stuff, a change in fundamentals of interaction, until they began to talk about themselves in new ways'.

It became clear eventually that these people were reforming personhood and the self.  The self was not merely better connected, but now more porous, more distributed, more cloud like.  This cultural fundamental, the definition of what and who a person is, was changing. … The reformation model says fundamental categories of our culture (particularly the self and the group and the terms with which we think about them) are changing.  …  This is a change in the basic terms of reference, the very  internal blue print with which we understand and construct the world.

Model four:  continuous presence (everything and everyone all the time)

One way to assess innovations is to make a guess about where we are headed.  I think our economic, social and cultural destination might be this: we will be continuously connected to all knowledge and all people with a minimum of friction, and privilege will be measured, in part, by how good are the filters with which we make contact with all but only the people and knowledge we care about.

As the comments to Grant's posting say, the role of the intermediaries, the filters, is crucial, for the alternative is information overload. (There are some other important points made there that need to be pondered.) Of course, blogs now act as filters.